The distinguished documentary producer Simon Chinn got the idea for Man on Wire while listening to a 2005 edition of Desert Island Discs featuring Philippe Petit - probably the only tightrope walker to have appeared on that programme, though he is no ordinary funambulist. He's the Frenchman who, on 7 August 1974, strung a 200-foot-high wire between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre and then walked along it, 1,368 feet in the air. This astonishing story takes us off in so many directions, and the film does its subject full justice.

In movie titles, the word 'tightrope' usually has a metaphorical meaning. The title of Elia Kazan's 1953 Man on a Tightrope refers not to one of his acrobats but to a Czech circus owner trying to stay in business in a vindictive communist state. Clint Eastwood's Tightrope is about the precarious balancing act of a New Orleans homicide cop. As it happens, the world's most powerful man was walking a tightrope the week Petit staged his famous 'coup': in the White House, Richard Nixon was swaying and then fell in the last scene of the Watergate drama.

Tightrope artists in the movies embody physical risk and are variously attractive, entrancing or sympathetically comic. In the first category is the kindly, whimsical wirewalker who wins the heart of Gelsomina in Fellini's La Strada, such a contrast to Anthony Quinn's brutal strongman. In the second category is the beautiful Pia Degermark, the tightrope walker who runs off with the married Swedish aristocrat in Elvira Madigan. Among several comic tightrope scenes the greatest is Chaplin's in The Circus.

The World Trade Centre never endeared itself to the public. The Twin Towers became a poor substitute for the Empire State Building in the first remake of King Kong, and housed the headquarters of the ruthless branch of the CIA pursuing Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor. More important, they represented the hubris that drove architects to build ever larger skyscrapers. Built in the financial hub of capitalism, the towers were subject to a fire in 1975 and a bomb attack in 1993, before the catastrophe that helped define the experience of our new century.

It is to the credit of Man on Wire, directed by James Marsh - a British film-maker with a particular interest in the American scene - that except for an ironic glimpse of Nixon's 'I am not a crook' speech on a TV screen, audiences are left to make their own connections. The Nixon speech is crucial to Philippe Petit's activities because, as we learn, the Frenchman was a wild rebel, disowned by his family, and his numerous skills as a street entertainer include picking pockets. Of his long-contemplated assault on the Twin Towers he says: 'It may have been illegal, but it wasn't wicked or mean.' He regards himself as an honourable prankster and adventurer, a confederate of Robin Hood, Raffles and Batman, living out his dreams and providing vicarious excitement for the rest of us.

Using interviews old and new, newsreel material, still photography, home movies, discreet documentary reconstructions and voiceover narration by several participants, Man on Wire unfolds in two parallel narratives. The first is what happened on that liberating day of 7 August 1974 after Petit and his team, a pair in each tower, went through the last stages of rigging the equipment and staging the walk.

The second is the story of Philippe's life from the moment as a teenager when, in a dentist's waiting room, he saw an artist's impression of what the completed World Trade Centre would look like. He forgot about his toothache, quietly ripped out the picture and made it his ambition to walk from one tower to the other of this still uncompleted building.

There is a further cinematic connection. Petit loved heist movies and this is a benign version of The Asphalt Jungle, Rififi or The Lavender Hill Mob, as Philippe draws together a trusted gang - first of French friends, then an Australian recruit and finally several key Americans. Two earlier capers test the gang's central core: a 1971 walk between the spires of Notre Dame in Paris and another, two years later, between the north pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, from which he gained experience and possibly finance as well. After the Australian triumph, he picked the pocket of the arresting officer.

The conspirators are a colourful, articulate crowd and there is the necessary moll, Philippe's girlfriend Annie, to provide romantic interest. There is also the question of who will crack up. Philippe is a self-dramatising character with a touch of the winsome young Jean-Louis Barrault (especially from Les Enfants du Paradis) as well as of Hollywood tough guy Kevin Bacon. The bizarre details of the gang's casing of the Twin Towers (at one stage disguised as a French TV crew making a documentary), finding an inside man to join the operation and then pulling off the job could have been invented by screenwriters, but life itself (with a little nod to the cinema) wrote this wonderful script.

Petit had a false pass in the name of 'Philip Asher' and a crutch that led everyone to facilitate his progress, rather like the assassin in The Day of the Jackal. The job would be less easy now and unlikely to result in such public pleasure and official forgiveness. Yet even then, there was the imminent prospect of Petit being dislodged by a police helicopter. Anyway, it's a terrific story about courage, obsession and friendship, cleverly and economically told, and a bit of a trial for acrophobes. And there's an excellent score drawing on Beethoven, Satie, Grieg, Vaughan Williams and Michael Nyman, including themes from his soundtrack to The Draughtsman's Contract. Perhaps the film's most haunting image is a photograph taken at an angle from beneath the tightrope. Petit lies on the wire, an airliner passes above. Suddenly two events - one sublime, the other horrendous - are surreally merged.

Famous wire walkers

1739 Robert Cadman dies performing his singular party trick of climbing 250 metres up a rope connected to the spire of St Mary's Church in Shrewsbury, then sliding down to earth by means of a wooden breastplate.

1876 Maria Spelterini becomes the first, and only, woman to tightrope-walk across the Niagara Falls. She elects to do this backwards, while wearing a paper bag on her head and peach baskets on her feet.

1939Hitler becomes one of Con Colleano's many fans as 'the Wizard of the Wire' performs his somersaulting act around Europe's vaudeville circuit.

1978Karl Wallenda, leader of the German troupe the Flying Wallendas, falls from a wire and dies at the age of 73. Famed for its seven-person pyramids, the troupe's traditions are upheld by various grandchildren.

2000A lowpoint for the highwire as Big Brother contestants on Channel 4 are challenged to master circus skills.

2007Chinese acrobat Adili Wuxiuer is featured in a documentary, Adili Skywalker, in which he crosses a rope at a height of 687 metres.

2008Catherine Yass's art installation, High Wire, offers a new perspective to Glasgow with footage of Didier Pasquette traversing a 90-metre high wire between two tower blocks at the Red Road estate. Hermione Hoby